- 注释版
- 纯净版
来源:
导读版：
各位听友可以感觉到，我7月份集中的在和大家分享“READ”这个话题，上次我们提到了read aloud或者是read out loud的方面，那么这一期的节目就来重点和大家探讨一下read a book的话题。文章是从一篇博客上摘取下来的，而文章的思路我们可以大致分成三个层面：为什么？是什么？怎么办？有一点像是在听马哲讲座。
1. 为什么我们需要一些指导来告诉我们如何去看书？培根的名言。
2. 这些个指导具体是什么？一个75年前的教育家写的一本书的中心思想，有四种读书状态。
3. 如何按照这些指导方法（本次节选具体讲了一个）去读？A.要会看书的封面和背面。B.要认真看书的前几页，比如说目录／前言／序言等。C.写实类小说，要扫标题看总结。D.要知道看书评。
虽然这一部分文章大标题只有两个，但是确实有三个大的方向思路。
Why Do We Need Instructions on How to Read a Book?
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” –Francis Bacon
[第1段]
In 1940, Mortimer Adler wrote the first edition of what is now considered a classic of education, How to Read a Book. There have been subsequent editions that contain great information, but the bulk of what we’ll be covering today is from Adler’s words of advice from nearly 75 years ago.
[第2段]
He states that there are four types of reading:
1. Elementary – This is just what it sounds like. It’s what we learn in elementary school and basically gets us to the point that we can understand the words on a page and read them, and follow a basic plot or line of understanding, but not much more.
2. Inspectional – This is basically skimming. You look at the highlights, read the beginning and end, and try to pick up as much as you can about what the author is trying to say. I’ll bet you did plenty of this with high school reading assignments; I know I did. Think of SparkNotes when you think of inspectional reading.
3. Analytical – This is where you really dive into a text. You read slowly and closely, you take notes, you look up words or references you don’t understand, and you try to get into the author’s head in order to be able to really get what’s being said.
4. Syntopical – This is mostly used by writers and professors. It’s where you read multiple books on a single subject and form a thesis or original thought by comparing and contrasting various other authors’ thoughts. This is time and research intensive, and it’s not likely that you’ll do this type of reading very much after college, unless your profession or hobby calls for it.
[第3段]
This post will cover inspectional and analytical reading, and we’ll focus mostly on analytical. Analytical reading is where most readers fall short. The average high schooler in America reads at a 5th grade level, and the average adult American reads somewhere between the 7th and 8th grade levels. This is where most popular fiction actually falls. For men, think Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Louis L’Amour, etc. These are books that are incredibly entertaining, and a great way to spend a weekend afternoon, but if we’re honest with ourselves, don’t challenge either our minds or manliness all that much. There are some fine examples of manhood in those characters to be sure, but the point is that you won’t get more out of reading them once than you will out of reading them five times. It’s also why these are the types of books that are always on the bestseller lists — they cater to the level that most Americans can actually read at.
[第4段]
How come people can’t read at a higher level? Are we a society full of dopes? Hardly. Adler argues that the reason actually lies in our education. Once we reach the point of elementary reading, it’s assumed that we can now read. And to a point, we can. But we never actually learn how to digest or critique a book. So we get to high school and college and get overloaded with reading assignments that we’re supposed to write long papers about, and yet we’ve never learned how to truly dissect a book and get the most value out of it.
[第5段]
That’s our task today with this post. Again, I’ll mostly cover analytical reading, but I’ll also touch on inspectional reading, and a couple other related tidbits as well.
Inspectional Reading
[第6段]
vintage bookstore library customers milling around As mentioned above, there are certainly times when inspectional reading is appropriate. It’s particularly useful when you’re at the bookstore trying to pick out your next book and deciding if the unknown object in front of you is worth the dough. (The good news is that you can also do this with ebooks — in most cases you can scan the cover, the table of contents, the introduction, etc. before actually buying.) This type of reading is also handy when trying to learn new things quickly, or when you’re just trying to get the gist of something. It’s great for the kind of reading you should be doing to stay current in your career as well; books related to a certain industry can often be full of fluff and chapters that just don’t apply to your particular job, and inspectional reading lets you glean the things that are actually helpful without wasting time on irrelevant material.
[第7段]
You can often get a pretty good feel for a book with inspectional reading by following the steps below. (To get the most out of this, you can actually follow along with a book off your shelf — it will only take 5-10 minutes.):
1. Read the title and look at the front and back covers of the book. This seems obvious, but if you pay attention, you can glean much more than you would have originally thought from just the cover of the book. What’s the title? Spend 10 seconds thinking about the title and subtitles. What is it telling you? We often glance over titles, but they often offer deep insight into the meaning of the book. I think of some of the classics I’ve recently read, The Sun Also Rises, The Grapes of Wrath, even Frankenstein. There’s more to these titles than meets the eye. In that last example, I’m told that the book is really more about Victor Frankenstein than about the monster he creates. It’s more about his human character than about horror. Are there images on the cover? What could those images be conveying? An incredible amount of time and money goes into cover art, so don’t neglect it. What does the blurb on the back of the book say? We often quickly scan these, but if we’re paying attention, they give us a great, succinct plot that often reveals what the book is truly about. Now it should be said that sometimes titles, cover art, and blurbs are designed more for marketing and increasing sales than they are about accurately conveying the ideas of the book, but they can usually still provide us with valuable clues as to the book’s content.
2. Pay special attention to the first pages of the book: the table of contents, the preface, the prologue, etc. These are incredibly useful pages. The table of contents will give you an outline of the entire book, which with non-fiction can tell you much of what you need to know right there. It’s a little harder with fiction, and many novels don’t have a table of contents, but take advantage of the ones that do. Especially with novels that are considered classics, you’ll often get all kinds of introductions and prefaces. For instance, my 50th anniversary one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings has a very detailed three-page table of contents. That’s followed by a “Note on the Text” that gives me a bit of its publishing history and Tolkien’s process in writing. I then have a “Note on the 50th Anniversary Edition” that tells me that certain changes were made using Tolkien’s notes and journals. There’s then a foreword from Tolkien himself that tells a little bit of his own purpose in writing. And then I get to the prologue, which is part of the book itself. Even reading just the first sentence tells me, roughly, what the entire series is about: “The book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.”
3. For non-fiction, skim headings and read the concluding chapter. The headings will actually often tell you the bulk of what you need to know of any non-fiction book. The text beneath the headings is often just fleshing out that main thought or theme. You can also read the conclusion to get a feel for what the author thought the main purpose or point of the book was. This is a little harder with fiction, as you don’t often get much for headings (outside of chapter titles), and at least for me, I certainly don’t want to know the end of the book. Although, I do know a fair amount of people who do; I still don’t understand that.
4. Consider reading some reviews of the book. Your most likely destination will be Amazon. Often the top-rated review on Amazon offers a lot of information about the book – a summary and/or some of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, you also have to take Amazon reviews with a grain of salt. Some negative reviews are from people who perhaps read a chapter and didn’t like something (see below regarding how to critique a book), or didn’t read the book at all! And sometimes people simply have an axe to grind against the author and are trying to “sabotage” them. And sadly when it comes to positive reviews, authors and publishers these days will sometimes pay for fake reviews of the book (a good clue for this is a whole boatload of 5-star reviews posted on the very same day/week the book is released). So look at the aggregate rating the book has received, then read a few 5-star, 3-star, and 1-star reviews and evaluate their credibility in order to get a better overall sense of the quality of the book.
重点词汇：
1. Subsequent ['sʌbsɪkwənt] 后来的，随后的
例：……the increase of population in subsequent years.
2. Intensive [ɪn'tɛnsɪv] 集中的，加强的，透彻的
例：...after several days and nights of intensive negotiations.
3. Cater ['ketɚ] 迎合，满足需求
例：Exercise classes cater to all levels of fitness.
4. Dope [dop] 笨蛋
5. Critique [krɪ'tik] 批判，评论
例：She had brought a book, a feminist critique of Victorian lady novelists.
6. Dissect [dɪˈsɛkt, daɪ-, ˈdaɪˌsɛkt] 解剖，仔细分析
例：We dissected a frog in biology class.
7. Tidbit ['tɪd'bɪt] 小栏报道，珍闻
例：As we explored, Ms. Foster announced that she had a final tidbit to divulge.
8. Dough [do] 生面团，金钱
9. Gist [dʒɪst] 主旨，要点
例：He related the gist of his conversation to Sam.
10. Fluff [flʌf] 绒毛，无价值的东西
例：The nest contained two chicks: just small grey balls of fluff.
11. Glean [ɡlin] 收集
例：At present we're gleaning information from all sources.
12. Neglect [nɪ'glɛkt] 忽略
例：The woman denied that she had neglected her child.
13. Blurb [blɝb] 推介，商品信息
例："An ode to the beauty and dignity of the human spirit, " says a cover blurb.
14. Succinct [sək'sɪŋkt] 简洁的，简明的
例：The book gives an admirably succinct account of the technology and its history.
15. Sabotage [,sæbə'tɑʒ] 破坏
例：The main pipeline supplying water was sabotaged by rebels.
16. Aggregate ['æɡrɪɡət; (for v.) æɡrɪˌɡet]
例：The rate of growth of GNP will depend upon the rate of growth of aggregate demand.
重难点句：
1. There have been subsequent editions that contain great information, but the bulk of what we’ll be covering today is from Adler’s words of advice from nearly 75 years ago.
之后还有包含着重要信息的版本，但我们今天要讲的重点都是来自Adler75年前所给出来的建议。
解析：there be 句型中，要知道be已经是这个句子的谓语了，而后面的那个名词性的成分是核心主语，后面的that来引导一个定语从句，修饰editions，后半句中的核心句型是A is from B，is之前的核心主语是bulk，bulk后面的of 表示的是一个所属的关系，什么样的bulk，我们今天将会涉及到的内容的bulk，of后面的核心词是what，我们会聊到的那个what，在往后看，从哪儿来呢？adler的建议，这个建议是75年前的建议，from nearly 75 years ago。
2. There are some fine examples of manhood in those characters to be sure, but the point is that you won’t get more out of reading them once than you will out of reading them five times.
在这些角色当中当然会有一些很好的男子汉气概的例子，但是，核心点在于，你读一遍是不可能比你读五遍得到更多的。
解析：but之前的句子又是一个there be句型，manhood表示的是男子汉气概，当然也有毅力或者勇气的意思，后面的to be sure就等于certainly，一定地／必然地这么一个概念。But，转折了，the point is that后面是主句的从句，也是这个point的本身的内容，you won’t get more out of reading them once than you will out of reading them five times是一个more….than….的比较句型。在这个句型里，比较的是一次和五次，而且相同的内容就给省去了，当然，原句还保留了助动词will，其实，这句话还可以再简练一点，把you will out of这四个词都省去，也就变成了，you won’t get more out of reading them once then reading them five times.
3. There’s more to these titles than meets the eye.
这些题目并不是像看上去的那么简单。
解析：这是一个固定的句型，尤其常用在there be 句型里，there be more to sb/sth than meets the eye. 理解过来就是不像表面上看起来的那么简单。More to后面跟的那个东西就是具体的什么不像表面上看起来的那么简单。我们看两个例子。There is more to her death than meets the eye - she was probably murdered. 她的死并没有那么简单，很有可能是谋杀。There must be more to him than meets the eye, or else why would she be interested in him?他这个人可不简单，要不然姑娘为什么会对他感兴趣呢？很地道的一个表达，要尝试着用。
4. The headings will actually often tell you the bulk of what you need to know of any non-fiction book. The text beneath the headings is often just fleshing out that main thought or theme.
标题通常会告诉你，那些纪实类书籍当中你所需要知道的重点。标题下面的内容都是对主要思想或主题的进一步充实。
解析：前一句的主框架是A will often tell you sth, 那个sth稍有复杂，我们解释一下，the bulk of what you need to know of any non-fiction book中，有这两个所属级，what you need to know是bulk的上一级，any non-fiction book是what you need to know的上一级，所以，我们在翻译理解的时候，就要到过来了，任何的纪实书籍中的你所要知道的重点。这句话就理通了。在看后一句话，the text beneath the headings，标题之下的正文，这是主语，flesh out sth表示的是使这个sth更加的充实丰盈的感觉，我们给两个例句来看一下，它怎么用。Permission for a warehouse development has already been granted and the developers are merely fleshing out the details. 货仓开发的许可证已获批准，开发商只是在充实细节。The play was good, except that the author needed to flesh out the third act. It was too short. 这个剧不赖，我觉得用“不赖”去翻译good非常贴切，这个剧不赖，除了说作者啊需要在充实一下第三幕戏，那一部分有点太短了。
5. Often the top-rated review on Amazon offers a lot of information about the book – a summary and/or some of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, you also have to take Amazon reviews with a grain of salt.
通常亚马逊上评分最高的那个书评都会给出来很多关于这本书的信息，要么是一个梗概要么是这本书的优缺点，或者是都有。比较扯的是，你也要辩证的有质疑的态度去看亚马逊上的评论。
解析：前半句不难，top-rated评分或者评论最高的review，书评，on amazon在亚马逊上，offer sth，提供了什么，给出了什么，summary是简写或者梗概的意思，后面的那个一对反义词特别好，strengths and weaknesses，优点和缺点的概念，非常漂亮的用法，在这儿啊。后半句里面就又出现了一个句型，take sth with a grain of salt, 对待什么东西要有质疑的态度，或者是要能够辩证的去看待，不能只看表面。给一个例句，看一下啊，I do take things in the mainstream with a grain of salt，对主流文化持有保留意见。
来源:
导读版：
各位听友可以感觉到，我7月份集中的在和大家分享“READ”这个话题，上次我们提到了read aloud或者是read out loud的方面，那么这一期的节目就来重点和大家探讨一下read a book的话题。文章是从一篇博客上摘取下来的，而文章的思路我们可以大致分成三个层面：为什么？是什么？怎么办？有一点像是在听马哲讲座。
1. 为什么我们需要一些指导来告诉我们如何去看书？培根的名言。
2. 这些个指导具体是什么？一个75年前的教育家写的一本书的中心思想，有四种读书状态。
3. 如何按照这些指导方法（本次节选具体讲了一个）去读？A.要会看书的封面和背面。B.要认真看书的前几页，比如说目录／前言／序言等。C.写实类小说，要扫标题看总结。D.要知道看书评。
虽然这一部分文章大标题只有两个，但是确实有三个大的方向思路。
Why Do We Need Instructions on How to Read a Book?
“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” –Francis Bacon
[第1段]
In 1940, Mortimer Adler wrote the first edition of what is now considered a classic of education, How to Read a Book. There have been subsequent editions that contain great information, but the bulk of what we’ll be covering today is from Adler’s words of advice from nearly 75 years ago.
[第2段]
He states that there are four types of reading:
1. Elementary – This is just what it sounds like. It’s what we learn in elementary school and basically gets us to the point that we can understand the words on a page and read them, and follow a basic plot or line of understanding, but not much more.
2. Inspectional – This is basically skimming. You look at the highlights, read the beginning and end, and try to pick up as much as you can about what the author is trying to say. I’ll bet you did plenty of this with high school reading assignments; I know I did. Think of SparkNotes when you think of inspectional reading.
3. Analytical – This is where you really dive into a text. You read slowly and closely, you take notes, you look up words or references you don’t understand, and you try to get into the author’s head in order to be able to really get what’s being said.
4. Syntopical – This is mostly used by writers and professors. It’s where you read multiple books on a single subject and form a thesis or original thought by comparing and contrasting various other authors’ thoughts. This is time and research intensive, and it’s not likely that you’ll do this type of reading very much after college, unless your profession or hobby calls for it.
[第3段]
This post will cover inspectional and analytical reading, and we’ll focus mostly on analytical. Analytical reading is where most readers fall short. The average high schooler in America reads at a 5th grade level, and the average adult American reads somewhere between the 7th and 8th grade levels. This is where most popular fiction actually falls. For men, think Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, Louis L’Amour, etc. These are books that are incredibly entertaining, and a great way to spend a weekend afternoon, but if we’re honest with ourselves, don’t challenge either our minds or manliness all that much. There are some fine examples of manhood in those characters to be sure, but the point is that you won’t get more out of reading them once than you will out of reading them five times. It’s also why these are the types of books that are always on the bestseller lists — they cater to the level that most Americans can actually read at.
[第4段]
How come people can’t read at a higher level? Are we a society full of dopes? Hardly. Adler argues that the reason actually lies in our education. Once we reach the point of elementary reading, it’s assumed that we can now read. And to a point, we can. But we never actually learn how to digest or critique a book. So we get to high school and college and get overloaded with reading assignments that we’re supposed to write long papers about, and yet we’ve never learned how to truly dissect a book and get the most value out of it.
[第5段]
That’s our task today with this post. Again, I’ll mostly cover analytical reading, but I’ll also touch on inspectional reading, and a couple other related tidbits as well.
Inspectional Reading
[第6段]
vintage bookstore library customers milling around As mentioned above, there are certainly times when inspectional reading is appropriate. It’s particularly useful when you’re at the bookstore trying to pick out your next book and deciding if the unknown object in front of you is worth the dough. (The good news is that you can also do this with ebooks — in most cases you can scan the cover, the table of contents, the introduction, etc. before actually buying.) This type of reading is also handy when trying to learn new things quickly, or when you’re just trying to get the gist of something. It’s great for the kind of reading you should be doing to stay current in your career as well; books related to a certain industry can often be full of fluff and chapters that just don’t apply to your particular job, and inspectional reading lets you glean the things that are actually helpful without wasting time on irrelevant material.
[第7段]
You can often get a pretty good feel for a book with inspectional reading by following the steps below. (To get the most out of this, you can actually follow along with a book off your shelf — it will only take 5-10 minutes.):
1. Read the title and look at the front and back covers of the book. This seems obvious, but if you pay attention, you can glean much more than you would have originally thought from just the cover of the book. What’s the title? Spend 10 seconds thinking about the title and subtitles. What is it telling you? We often glance over titles, but they often offer deep insight into the meaning of the book. I think of some of the classics I’ve recently read, The Sun Also Rises, The Grapes of Wrath, even Frankenstein. There’s more to these titles than meets the eye. In that last example, I’m told that the book is really more about Victor Frankenstein than about the monster he creates. It’s more about his human character than about horror. Are there images on the cover? What could those images be conveying? An incredible amount of time and money goes into cover art, so don’t neglect it. What does the blurb on the back of the book say? We often quickly scan these, but if we’re paying attention, they give us a great, succinct plot that often reveals what the book is truly about. Now it should be said that sometimes titles, cover art, and blurbs are designed more for marketing and increasing sales than they are about accurately conveying the ideas of the book, but they can usually still provide us with valuable clues as to the book’s content.
2. Pay special attention to the first pages of the book: the table of contents, the preface, the prologue, etc. These are incredibly useful pages. The table of contents will give you an outline of the entire book, which with non-fiction can tell you much of what you need to know right there. It’s a little harder with fiction, and many novels don’t have a table of contents, but take advantage of the ones that do. Especially with novels that are considered classics, you’ll often get all kinds of introductions and prefaces. For instance, my 50th anniversary one-volume edition of The Lord of the Rings has a very detailed three-page table of contents. That’s followed by a “Note on the Text” that gives me a bit of its publishing history and Tolkien’s process in writing. I then have a “Note on the 50th Anniversary Edition” that tells me that certain changes were made using Tolkien’s notes and journals. There’s then a foreword from Tolkien himself that tells a little bit of his own purpose in writing. And then I get to the prologue, which is part of the book itself. Even reading just the first sentence tells me, roughly, what the entire series is about: “The book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.”
3. For non-fiction, skim headings and read the concluding chapter. The headings will actually often tell you the bulk of what you need to know of any non-fiction book. The text beneath the headings is often just fleshing out that main thought or theme. You can also read the conclusion to get a feel for what the author thought the main purpose or point of the book was. This is a little harder with fiction, as you don’t often get much for headings (outside of chapter titles), and at least for me, I certainly don’t want to know the end of the book. Although, I do know a fair amount of people who do; I still don’t understand that.
4. Consider reading some reviews of the book. Your most likely destination will be Amazon. Often the top-rated review on Amazon offers a lot of information about the book – a summary and/or some of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, you also have to take Amazon reviews with a grain of salt. Some negative reviews are from people who perhaps read a chapter and didn’t like something (see below regarding how to critique a book), or didn’t read the book at all! And sometimes people simply have an axe to grind against the author and are trying to “sabotage” them. And sadly when it comes to positive reviews, authors and publishers these days will sometimes pay for fake reviews of the book (a good clue for this is a whole boatload of 5-star reviews posted on the very same day/week the book is released). So look at the aggregate rating the book has received, then read a few 5-star, 3-star, and 1-star reviews and evaluate their credibility in order to get a better overall sense of the quality of the book.